Part 29 (2/2)
Finally, it is a question of the government doing what it ought not to have done and leaving undone those things it ought to have done.
It has granted to a few monopolies transportation and terminal facilities which enable them to hold up deliveries and thus control prices. The remedy lies in seeing that the government attend to its own business, which is securing equality of opportunity for all, and special privileges to none.
It follows that cooperation should not stop either at production or at distribution. It must embrace the source of both, nor even stop at governmental plans of small holdings.
As a business enterprise, combining philanthropy and percentage, capital has an opportunity.
Accordingly an option should be secured upon a large piece of land not over forty miles from a large city, near a railroad station. The transportation at first is not important, as the new commuters will make a demand for it, and cheap autos will largely fill the gap; it will improve rapidly.
If possible it should have a lake or a fair stream on it for irrigation and small water power; the soil should be examined by experts, to see that it is suitable for trucking and market gardening.
The object should be to make a sort of vacant lot gardening plan on a grand scale. Heretofore the trouble has been that we have been unable to get land where there was any a.s.surance that we could have it again the second year, and that the limited amount of land makes it impossible to give the men as much as they ought to have. They do not need much land, because a man working at intensive culture with only the rough plowing done for him cannot take good care of much more than one acre of land. He will probably make as much money out of one acre of land as he will out of two. Those who are willing to work should be given one acre of land, with the a.s.surance that they can have it as long as they work it faithfully and comply with the simple rules which we have found so effective in the Vacant Lot Gardening work,--which are practically, that a man should attend to business and not annoy his neighbors. No contract or lease should be given the men, or indeed the women, for both work such gardens, as they have been doing for the past twenty years in several large cities, making at least a living upon the land and often a very large return.
There must be a competent superintendent, for everything depends upon him, who would show the men what land they should use, what they should put in, instruct them how to do it, and market their products cooperatively. Experience in Philadelphia, and in some score of other cities where they have established Vacant Lot Gardens, shows that about ten per cent annually of the people prefer to work for others, and consequently take places in the country after they have learned to do market gardening. Some others, being dissatisfied with so little land, and wanting to own their own place, go off and buy land or lease it for themselves. This makes a constant drain from the gardens, leaving openings for others who will learn in time their trade; it is possible to make in this way a steady drain out of the cities to the country, and what is better still, an automatic drain.
The land must be so near to a center of population that it may be possible to take a gang of men down there in the morning, show them what it is, and send back those who do not seem likely to make good, or who are dissatisfied; and that when men get their gardens successfully running, they may be able to bring their friends there to see what they have done, and say to them, ”Go thou and do likewise.”
I have been at Trudeau, Saranac Lake, and at Stony Wold, the consumptive sanitariums, and found there both by observation and by testimony that to send back the convalescents to the bench or the workshop from which they came is practically to rep.r.o.nounce upon them the sentence of death from which the sanitarium has offered them a reprieve. The only practical thing to do with such convalescents, and with such persons who are not capable of their ordinary avocations, is to get them in some way upon the land. There is a large demand for persons who understand the new intensive gardening, and places can be found for more than we can hope to educate in that line.
There should be buildings upon the land sufficient to bunk one hundred to one hundred and fifty men; accommodations could be made with the small timber for a considerable number. Many of these men would need some help, but most of them would s.h.i.+ft for themselves if only they could get the opportunity to build upon the land and to have a secure tenure of it. A mere tenant knows that it is bunk.u.m when he says ”Our Country.”
It is perfectly practicable to sell about one half of the land in a year or two, and have a thousand acres or more left free and clear, which will cost the promoters nothing. Renting this out or selling it will repay the whole cost, and probably bring a large profit besides.
This is no experiment, it is only to do the thing that we have been doing under various conditions with various sorts of men in different localities for the past twenty years in the Vacant Lot Gardens: namely, to give men the opportunity of living upon and cultivating land, putting up their own tents, shacks, or bungalows, and giving them such instruction and such help as does not cost anything more than the salary of the superintendent. There are abundant men who can make good and s.h.i.+ft for themselves under those circ.u.mstances; the men who are available are single men, such men as those for whom Mr. Hallimond, a clergyman working in the Bowery, has been finding rural employment in the past ten years. Also many families will come to us through the Vacant Lot Gardens and the Little Land agitation. People such as these will increase the land value, for every decent man carries around with him at least five hundred dollars' worth of increase in land values which his presence adds to somebody's holdings of land. The struggle to pocket this increase accounts for much of the human drift from the field to the factory.
G.o.d made the country; man made the city--and the devil made the suburbs, by the aid of the speculator.
Alpha of the Plough says in the London _Star:_ ”I was walking with a friend along the Spaniards-road the other evening talking on the inexhaustible theme of these days, when he asked, 'What is the biggest thing that has happened to this country as the outcome of the war?'
”'It is within two or three hundred yards from here,' I replied.
'Come this way and I'll show it to you.'
”He seemed a little surprised, but accompanied me cheerfully enough as I turned from the road and plunged through the gorse and the trees towards Parliament Fields, until we came upon a large expanse of allotments, carved out of the great playground, and alive with figures, men, women, and children, some earthing up potatoes, some weeding onion beds, some thinning out carrots, some merely walking along the patches, and looking at the fruits of their labor springing from the soil. 'There,' I said, 'is the most important result of the war.'
”He laughed, but not contemptuously. He knew what I meant, and I think he more than half agreed.
”And I think you will agree, too, if you will think what that stretch of allotments means. It is the symptom of the most important revival, the greatest spiritual awakening this country has seen for generations. Wherever you go, that symptom meets you. Here in Hampstead allotments are as plentiful as blackberries in autumn. A friend of mine who lives in Beckenham tells me there are fifteen hundred in his parish. In the neighborhood of London there must be many thousands. In the country as a whole there must be hundreds of thousands. If dear old Joseph Fels could revisit the glimpses of the moon and see what is happening, see the vacant lots and waste s.p.a.ces bursting into onion beds and potato patches, what joy would be his!
He was the forerunner of the revival, the pa.s.sionate pilgrim of the Vacant Lot: but his hot gospel fell on deaf ears, and he died just before the trumpet of war awakened the sleeper.
”Do not suppose that the greatness of this thing that is happening can be measured in terms of food. That is important, no doubt, but it is not the most important thing. I am confident that it will add more than anything else to the spiritual resources of the nation. It is the beginning of a war on the disease that is blighting our people. What is wrong with us? What is the root of our social and spiritual ailment? Is it not the divorce of the people from the soil? For generations the wholesome red blood of the country has been sucked into the great towns, and we have built up a vast machine of industry that has made slaves of us, shut out the light of the fields from our lives, left our children to grow like weeds in the slums, rootless and waterless, poisoned the healthy instincts of nature implanted in us, and put in their place the rank growths of the streets. Can you walk through a working-cla.s.s district or a Lancas.h.i.+re cotton town, with their huddle of airless streets, without a feeling of despair coming over you at the sense of this enormous perversion of life into the arid channels of death? Can you take pride in an Empire on which the sun never sets when you think of the courts in which, as Will Crooks says, the sun never rises?
”And now the sun is going to rise. We have started a revolution that will not end until the breath of the earth has come back to the soul of the people. The tyranny of the machine is going to be broken. The tyranny of the land monopoly is going to be lifted. Yes, you say, but these people that I see working on the allotments are not the people from the courts and the slums; but professional men, the superior artisan, and so on. That is true. But the movement must get hold of the _intelligenzia_ first. The important thing is that the breach in the prison is made; the fresh air is filtering in; the idea is born--not still-born, mind you, but born a living thing. It is a way of salvation that will not be lost, and that all will travel.
”We have found the land, and we are going back to possess it. Take a man out of the street and put him in a garden, and you have made a new creature of him. I have seen the miracle again and again. I know a bus conductor, for example, outwardly the most ordinary of his kind. But one night I mentioned allotments, touched the key of his soul, and discovered that this man was going about his daily work irradiated by the thought of his garden triumphs. He had got a new purpose in life. He had got the spirit of the earth in his bones. It is not only the humanizing influence of the garden, it is its democratizing influence too.
”When Adam delved and Eve span Where was then the gentleman?'
You can get on terms with the lowliest if you will discuss gardens.”
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